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I am geoff stead. This is a vintage blog of mine I'm reviving for m-learning thoughts that stray beyond the day job. You can find my work with enterprise mobile learning at WorkLearnMobile.org, and in english language learning over at beta.cambridgeenglish.org

Thursday, July 12

We end up buying an awful lot of smartphones - many of them PocketPC based. (probably almost 3000 over the last couple of years)

it is always a really messy business, haggling with suppliers to get the best price. And it gets extra complicated trying to compare different devices when network providers are rebranding and renaming what are often, essentially, the same phones.If this sounds familiar to you, there is a shining beacon of hope: the fantastic xda-developers.com.

If you want to figure out your Blue Angel from your Wizard, have a look at the wiki (at wiki.xda-developers.com). They list all the different models, and the many names they have been given.

This is especially useful because the vast majority of these phones are all made by a single Taiwanese manufacturer, HTC.

The forums (at forum.xda-developers.com) are also great for technical support. spectacularly better than any of the network providers we have used in fact. The best one stop shop for tips on how to upgrade the operating system, or unlock your phone, or even fix that nagging problem you are having.

Monday, July 2

We build applications for all sorts of different phones, and despite the hype, many of the development tools and platforms we use are fairly stable: (MMS, SMS, Flash, Flash Lite, C for PPC etc).

The one technology that we seem to be endlessly tweaking is Java for phones (J2ME), because despite the good-karma that surrounds java's "runs on any device" ethos, the harsh reality is that each phone is different, and J2ME applications need to be tweaked endlessly to deal with new phones.

In fact, we have a huge box full of ex-ebay phones we use for testing.

But how do we know WHICH phones to test on, and which to build for?

It is a bit of a black art, and we rely heavily on our friends (thanks Wolf!) but here are a few useful links:

2. then, you need to try to get some "install base" lists. This is a lot harder to do, as you need access to some insider knowledge, or very expensive reports. Here is a UK list for jan07:

Nokia

6230i

1,614,900

Samsung

D500

981,660

Motorola

RAZR V3 Black Edition

932,760

Sony Ericsson

K800i

879,900

Nokia

6230

860,470

Sony Ericsson

K750i

792,680

Nokia

6280

781,560

Samsung

D600

774,260

Nokia

3310

769,520

Nokia

1100

744,440

but this still doesn't help you narrow down to your target group. What we do for this group is:

3: We make our own lists. Because we offer free previews of many of our java games, we log all incoming connections against phone types. That way we can spot trends, as well as see new phone-variants we don't support yet and do some preventative development!

here is a sneaky screen dump from one of our games. You can see there are two columns - the red (pre-support) shows the number of downloads we missed out on, and the green (post-support) are the success stories. For total attempts you need to add these together.